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2
3
Yes No
Debate Score:5
Arguments:5
Total Votes:17
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 Yes (2)
 
 No (3)

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Hard work beats talent?

Is hard work really more important than talent? Can it ever make up for your lack of talent? Many people will agree with this, yet in reality, cases where the oppositehappens can be seen everywhere. So what do you guys think? Talent or hard work?

Yes

Side Score: 2
VS.

No

Side Score: 3

This is obviously dependent on the level of hard work versus the level of talent; and the subject or matter in question.

For example, no matter how much I might labour at ballet, I shall never possess the graceful poise and dexterity of a naturally talented ballerina.

Conversely, I have never before met anybody who can by hard work overcome my natural faculties (which are too numerous to list here) unless they are themselves similarly gifted.

A l'autre main, je sais un gentilhomme dans ma classe de mathématiques qui a talent, mais pas le désir de travailler. Donc, il rate chaque épreuve.

Side: Many factors
0 points

Raw talent is nothing without some sort of work.

However, hard work always leads to the development of talents.

Let us take Chinese people in general. They have incredible work ethics. Do we really believe that they were born able to solve every math problem they are given? No. They do 20 math problems everyday until all they have to do is read the first word of a problem to solve it. Now, look at them now. In the US, they fill up all the great medical schools. Without exception.

I actually believe that people who work their way up with nothing at all are more impressive than naturally gifted people.

Side: yes
1 point

We’ve all heard that hard work is the key to success. But a recent study found that the “profoundly gifted” still have an edge over peers who have less natural talent but are perhaps more dedicated to improving their skills. Have you experienced the power of talent over hard work? Or have you found that success comes to the person willing to put in the most time and effort to achieve it?

In the Sunday Review piece “Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters,” David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz describe this study, along with their own research findings that support the idea that talent, not dedication, is the ultimate predictor of success:

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.

Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.

It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

Side: No

Talent seems to be a stealer. Someone can work hard all his life but someone with a talent comes along and will get all the attention plus a big salary for his talent.

Side: No
-8 points